Pick out your darkest petticoats ladies because Seth Grahame- Smith and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a classic zombie novel unlike any other.
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The 2009 National Book Award finalists were announced yesterday. Winners will be awarded at the National Book Foundation's 60th anniversary celebration on November 18th. And don't forget to vote for the Best of The National Book Awards Fiction winner! See my previous blog for details.
FICTION
American Salvage--Bonnie Jo Campbell
Let The Great World Spin--Colum McCann
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders--Daniyal Mueenuddin
Lark and Termite--Jayne Anne Phillips
Far North--Marcel Theroux
NONFICTION
Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook—David M. Carroll
Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species—Sean B. Carroll
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City-Greg Grandin
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy--Adrienne Meyer
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt—T.J. Stiles
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The slightly warped logic of that sentence (what is it, a developer’s advertising tag?) has been popping into my mind lately. For a slightly warped reason, I admit.
I’m rereading Flashforward, the 1999 novel by Robert J. Sawyer that is of course the basis for the hot new TV series of the same name.
What’s the connection? Just that the book has been in the library’s collection for ten years, a long time before Hollywood discovered it.
So why wait for blockbuster adaptations or bestseller lists or any of the other indications of mass demand? Come talk to your librarian if you want a good recommendation. There are all kinds of great books that are sitting waiting for you in the library stacks, and we’re happy to talk to you about them. If you can tell us about a few books you have enjoyed, we can find you others that you may love as much. Works for music and movies, too.
Hey, you’ll be so far ahead of the crowd that you could even go off and pitch adaptations to movie and TV studios. (Someone needs to tell George Clooney about Alan Furst’s The World at Night.)
Or you’ll just be snugly curled up in your own home with something wonderful to read.
Ever wonder what happens to the survivors of a murdered family? Usually, one family member survives. How are they? How do they live? DO they live? Flynn answers these questions and many more of the like in her incredible second outing, Dark Places.
I posted several months ago about John Crowley’s Lord Byron’s Novel, a complex literary/historical puzzler about Byron and his mathematically-minded daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace.
Crowley’s new novel, Four Freedoms, is very different, a very American story. It’s set on the homefront during World War II, when people’s lives were tossed up like decks of cards and came down in configurations they could not previously have imagined.
The novel’s main character is Prosper Olander, a young man with a severe curvature of the spine. Despite the botched operation that has left him unable to walk without crutches, he is an optimistic and curious person—qualities that make him more successful with women than other men might imagine.
Prosper has escaped his hometown and a charity job to work at a huge bomber manufacturing plant in Oklahoma. The prefab town that has mushroomed overnight to house the plant’s thousands of workers is home to many others who have left their pasts behind.
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Kudos to our good friends at the Mercantile Library over on Walnut St. Their recent blog posting points out some very interesting facts regarding the use of libraries in the US, including the claim that "Americans spend more than three times as much on salty snacks as they do on public libraries."
That is what I call food for thought.
Grey’s Anatomy actress Ellen Pompeo recently gave birth to a daughter on September 15th, naming her Stella Luna Pompeo Ivery. Stellaluna just so happens to be an adorable children’s book by Jannell Cannon, about a fruit bat separated from her mother and adopted by a family of birds.
If the name Stella Luna doesn’t inspire the expectant parents, then the library has plenty of baby name books to consider, such as:
A is for Atticus: Baby Names from Great Books by Lorilee Craker
Baby Names Made Easy: The Complete Reverse Dictionary of Baby Names by Amanda Elizabeth Barden
Beyond Ava & Aiden: The Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby by Linda Rosenkrantz
Cool Names for Babies by Pamela Redmond Satran
The Name Book: Over 10,000 Names--Their Meanings, Origins, and Spiritual Significance by Dorothy Astoria
60,001+ Best Baby Names by Dianne Stafford
